Last week, San Francisco was descended by 170,000+ attendees from about 83 countries for the annual Salesforce Dreamforce 2018, one of the world’s largest technology conference. Exciting announcements, new products and strategic partnerships set the tone for a robust Salesforce 2018 product suite.

The keynote speaker, Keith Block, co-CEO at Salesforce said “nearly every company and every industry is going through an amazing digital transformation. Salesforce is enabling our customers to drive growth and success by putting their customers at the centre of everything they do” said, while Founder and Co-CEO Marc Benioff emphasized the power of this connection and how technology is changing the way we live both in our personal and professional lives.

This year was no exception! As the previous years, the conference witnessed the unveil of a multitude of new integration, productivity and AI platform services, and also announced new strategic partnerships to help its partners connect with customers in new ways.

The CRM and iOS relationship

Salesforce and Apple strengthened ties by bringing together the CRM platform and iOS to create new mobile apps for business. Working together, Salesforce is redesigning its app to embrace Apple’s platform with exclusive new features on iOS. They will also provide tools and resources for millions of Salesforce developers to build their own native apps.

Strategic partnership with Amazon Web Services

With the two firms expanding their global strategic alliance announcing product integrations aimed at simplifying how customers can securely share and synchronise data across AWS and Salesforce services. The expanded partnership is also good news for users of Salesforce Service Cloud—customers are now able to build dynamic, AI-driven self-service voice experiences with a Lightning-integrated agent.

Einstein goes native

Since its introduction two years ago, Einstein has been one of the platforms with the maximum updates. This year, it gets natural language capabilities. This functionality allows users to direct their CRMs with their voice and initiate tasks i.e. notes dictation and chatbot creation etc. Voice control commands is a breakthrough in CRM features that will allow users to increase productivity by delegating most of their tasks.

360 degree customer view

With Salesforce acquiring Mulesoft, their largest deal till date, their integration cloud was delivered with the focus on visualizing customers and harnessing data to build an accurate profile on them. Customer 360 offers businesses a click based admin interface that makes it simple to connect and manage customer data across multiple apps.

Customer 360 can also identify across multiple channels, using everything – name, number, social media to instantly access and bring up the customer profile.

We at VSynergize are kicked to see a major transformation in how CRM is being used and how users interact with companies, integrated with demand generation programs. Study reports that businesses that implement artificial intelligence see 59% better close rates for sales, 58% increased revenue, 54% more traffic and engagement, and 52% higher conversion. The increasing tech abilities, services such as customer support, list segmentation, and prospect data are faster and more readily available. With Artificial Intelligence playing a major role, we see see a future that is conversational, contextual and intuitive.